Every tool you need for effective public consultation
ConsultOnline brings together 12 powerful features into a single planning consultation software platform — purpose-built for UK councils, planning consultancies, and community engagement teams. Stop juggling disconnected tools and manage your entire consultation lifecycle from one place.
Core Platform — The foundation of your consultation management system
Build engaging online consultations with interactive surveys, spatial feedback maps, branded microsites, and a mobile-first experience that works offline. These core features form the backbone of every ConsultOnline consultation.
Interactive Surveys
Drag-and-drop survey builder with 11 question types, conditional logic, and real-time response collection for public consultations.
Interactive Maps
Pin-drop spatial feedback on proposals with category filtering, comment threads, and heatmap visualisation for planning applications.
Branded Microsites
Every consultation gets its own branded microsite with custom colours, logo, and subdomain — building trust with your community.
Mobile & Offline (PWA)
A progressive web app that works on any device. Respondents can complete surveys offline at events, with responses syncing when connectivity returns.
Analytics & Reporting — Turn consultation responses into actionable insight
Stop spending weeks manually coding open-text responses. ConsultOnline's built-in analytics engine automatically analyses sentiment, identifies themes, and generates committee-ready reports — so your team can focus on planning outcomes, not data processing.
Real-time Analytics
Live dashboards with automated sentiment analysis, demographic breakdowns, response trends, and theme extraction across all consultation channels.
Reports & Export
Committee-ready PDF reports with automated summaries, raw CSV data exports, and branded report templates — generated in minutes, not weeks.
Engagement Tools — Reach every resident, not just the loudest voices
Effective community engagement requires meeting people where they are — online, at exhibitions, through their letterbox, and via intelligent chatbots that answer questions around the clock. ConsultOnline's engagement tools help you maximise participation and hear from groups who are typically underrepresented in planning consultations.
Exhibition Mode
Run in-person consultation events with tablet kiosk mode, QR code sign-in, and offline response capture. Bridge the gap between physical and digital engagement.
Notifications & Alerts
Keep communities informed with automated email notifications, push alerts, subscriber management, and consultation milestone updates.
Intelligent Chatbot
An intelligent assistant that answers common questions about your consultation 24/7, guiding residents through proposals and reducing the burden on your team.
Direct Mail
Generate and send personalised consultation letters to residents within a defined boundary. Integrated address lookup and mail-merge for physical outreach.
Management & Compliance — Stay organised, stay compliant
Public consultation carries real regulatory responsibilities. ConsultOnline's built-in CRM and accessibility features help you manage stakeholder relationships, track engagement history, and ensure every consultation meets WCAG 2.1 AA standards and Equality Act requirements — without bolting on extra tools.
Stakeholder CRM
Track every stakeholder interaction across consultations. Manage contact lists, segment audiences, log engagement history, and maintain a single source of truth for community relationships.
Accessibility & Compliance
WCAG 2.1 AA compliant by default. Built-in screen reader support, keyboard navigation, high-contrast mode, and easy-read formatting to meet Equality Act and public sector accessibility requirements.
Why ConsultOnline?
The public consultation platform built for how planning teams actually work
One platform, not a patchwork of tools
Most consultation teams cobble together a survey tool, a separate mapping platform, a generic email service, and a shared spreadsheet for contact management. The result is fragmented data, duplicated effort, and no single view of engagement. ConsultOnline replaces that patchwork with a unified consultation management system where surveys, maps, CRM, notifications, analytics, and reporting all share the same data layer. Every response, whether it arrives online, at an exhibition, or through a posted letter, flows into one place — giving you a complete picture of community sentiment without manual data wrangling.
Purpose-built for UK planning consultations
ConsultOnline is not a generic survey tool adapted for planning. It was designed from the ground up for the specific needs of UK public consultation — from Statement of Community Involvement (SCI) compliance to Ordnance Survey map integration. The platform understands planning terminology, generates reports in formats that planning committees expect, and structures data collection around the questions that planning officers actually need answered. Whether you are running a Regulation 18 Local Plan consultation or a pre-application engagement for a major development, the workflows are built in rather than bolted on.
Mobile-first with genuine offline support
ConsultOnline is a progressive web app designed mobile-first, with a responsive interface that works beautifully on phones and tablets — not a desktop tool squeezed onto a small screen. More importantly, it works offline — critical for exhibition events in community halls, church halls, and village centres where reliable internet is not guaranteed. Respondents can complete surveys without connectivity, and their responses sync automatically when they are back online. No app store download required.
Physical and digital engagement, unified
Effective consultation cannot be digital-only. Hard-to-reach groups, elderly residents, and people without reliable internet access deserve the same opportunity to participate. ConsultOnline bridges physical and digital engagement with exhibition mode for in-person events, direct mail integration for postal outreach, and QR codes that connect printed materials to online surveys. All responses — whether typed on a laptop, tapped on a tablet at an exhibition, or received as a posted letter — are captured in the same system, analysed together, and reported as one dataset. No more reconciling spreadsheets from different channels.
12
Powerful features in one platform
3
Flexible consultation packages
AA
WCAG 2.1 AA compliant
EU
Hosted in Europe & GDPR compliant
Ready to modernise your consultations?
Join councils and planning consultancies across the UK who are using ConsultOnline to run more inclusive, data-driven public consultations. See how our consultation management system can transform your community engagement.